This book proposes that certain qualities for which English Renaissance drama is famous, such as what Dryden called its ‘variety and greatness of characters’ and its ‘copiousness and well-knitting of intrigue’, may be in part attributable to the close relationship in this period between developments in English legal culture and those in dramatic writing. The book shows how the English justice system underwent changes in the 16th century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peac ... More

This book proposes that certain qualities for which English Renaissance drama is famous, such as what Dryden called its ‘variety and greatness of characters’ and its ‘copiousness and well-knitting of intrigue’, may be in part attributable to the close relationship in this period between developments in English legal culture and those in dramatic writing. The book shows how the English justice system underwent changes in the 16th century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make their plays more persuasively realistic, more ‘probable’. The result of this enormously rich conjunction of popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric was a drama in which dramatis personae habitually gather evidence and ‘invent’ arguments of suspicion and conjecture about one another, thus prompting us, as readers and audience, to reconstruct this ‘evidence’ as stories of characters' private histories and inner lives. In this drama, people act in uncertainty, inferring one another's motives and testing evidence for their conclusions. This book thus provides an account of the transformation from allegorical to mimetic modes of drama that associates the latter with the gradual shift, in the judicial sphere, from penitential to evidential models of justice.